As part of my dissertation for my MBA I have decided to do some research about award programs and fraud. The actual disseration of my proposal has not been completed. However, the current draft outline is to:

1. Develop a reasonable model for estimating award program fraud.
2. Performing some estimates for some individual award programs to try to discover any regional or program-size differences.
3. Develop a set techniques based upon fraud prevention techniques from other fields catered towards award programs.

I have been a member of FlyerTalk for many years and am hoping that many of you are able to provide me with some valuable input.

Specifically I am looking for your support with:

1. Any stories or background information that you can supply me with concerning award program fraud. This could be incidents of fraud or different techniques that programs have used in the past to prevent fraud

2. Contact names and/or details of executives in different award programs. I plan on developing a questionnaire and contacting different programs to get first-hand feedback about the topic. Yes, I am a bit concerned about how willing the different programs might be about publicizing such information.

3. I may also create a questionnaire for the FT community to augment the questionnaire.

In return I promise to provide an update on how the work is going and give a copy of the final product to anyone that requests it.

I thank everyone in advance for their contributions.

(Mods, please move thread if this is in the wrong forum)

Regards,

Do you mean us defrauding them, or them defauding us?

Them defrauding us would also be an interesting topic. However I am going for people that are defrauding the programs.

Conte Nast did an expose about 10 years ago on a person who received jail time for fraud on AA. I believe the person did time in Indiana and was Dallas based, You can start here. I was shocked by the article. Aslo some employees at continental were disiplined for creating false accounts.

You should also check with Qantus.

Hope this helps

I am going to be working on this again in the coming months... The whole world of the programs not coming thru for us is probably WHY some people chose to fraud THEM!

http://www.theothersideoftraveling.com

I would seriously work on the issue from the standpoint of the customer--the little guy--as way too many things have been siding with THE MAN or the big corporation. For example, everything you do now--calling CSRs or going into a building and standing in line, has to do with SECURITY. Well, I have found, as many of you surely have, that this SECURITY is not for YOU, it is to SAVE THEM and they could care less about you.

It is thusly true that we have NO security--or far far less than we ever have as consumers!
Sure they have your info locked in some secure online web site or something, prompting you to log in with 5 new password reminders that if you type one incorrectly too many times, it makes you call them and start all over, but hey, this is to save THEIR butts, not yours. Case and point: Anyone see the recent news on how TJX corp was hacked and all these people's credit and debit info was stolen?

Well, did I get a call after having shopped there for 3 weeks since the holidays? NOPE!


OP:
Just please do a lot of focus on how the companies often screw US!!!

thanks and good luck. MM

ps if you need more examples, I have saved every "packet" of stuff or letter mailed in contest to any airline or company I have ever done business with in the past 7 years that involved an issue with service. Like so many here in FT, I have seen it all! (we should have credentials issued to us that enable us to get past some of the hoops they make us jump thru, and you all know what I mean!)

FT has honed my skills and while I may not TRY to take advantage of things in some areas of life, I have learned one must do exactly that in the world of airline travel just in order to survive!

I rememer a story on FT of a guys NWA account being cleaned out by a stranger that redeamed his miles and used them. When he contacted NWA they said tough luck you need to sue the criminal.


So did the criminal defraud the passenger or did the criminal defraud the airline and then the airline defraud the customer?

I tend to think the latter is the answer but I'm not positive. I liken it to when someone cleans out your bank account the bank must take responsibility fr failing to properly identify the payee.

your dissertation is really interesting--- but where do you have to write a paper in order to get your MBA?

It's a really interesting topic, but I think trying to find people who have been defrauded would be difficult.

If someone stole my miles, I would probably contact NW first. But NW would probably say, we can't help you. There might be a record of this at NW, there might not. (Their TOC might say right out that NW isn't responsible, so the CSR might not even bother going too far up the chain.)
My next step is my local DAs office or AGs office or police. But they would probably only look at the stated value of miles if that. I doubt they have files of FF miles stolen. You'd probably have to get people who just remember, but the chances of them remembering the actual name of the case, even if they remember the situation, I don't imagine would be good.

Then again, where there's a will, there's a way. Good luck.

I believe the most common form of "fraud" (as seen from the airlines' perspective) is the sale of frequent flyer awards for example on Ebay.

We have no idea what you are talking about.

So does it count as fraud when we flyertalkers take advantage of incorrectly keyed rates? E.g., when 1-800-flowers gave 100 miles for every dollar spent on flowers? Or even more fraudulent when we bought gift certificates for future purchases instead of earning our miles from flowers being delivered right then and there?

Or who is defrauding whom when an offer made is clearly not in the best econonmic interest of the business making the offer, because

1. That business does not understand the value of the miles offered, and we do
2. And then the business renigs on the offer.

Consider the Swiss Knight Cheese - American Airlines offer, for example. Who is guilty here?

We need a definition of fraud.

I believe any UK-based university requires it.

Related is the issue of airlines' fraud detection incorrectly assuming that something is being done fraudulently when it was not (or at least not intended by the frequent flyer). There have been some threads on the UA forum about aggressive UA fraud detection methods sometimes accusing non-fraudulent users of awards / miles.

I agree, at least from the standpoint of the most "common" form of what the airlines would consider fraud.